Open Source Tools Break with Convention by Kevin Morris
The walled fortress is a time honored tradition in the FPGA business. Since the beginning of FPGA time, vendors of programmable logic silicon have kept a tight grip on the tool chains that are used to program their devices. If you want to do anything with a vendor’s chips, you need the vendor’s tools and the vendor’s rules. The only exceptions have been close partnerships between FPGA companies and EDA companies to provide key bits of technology that the vendor either couldn’t or didn’t feel like developing internally.